To such an old age may He
bring you and me, and all for whom we are bound to pray.
LECTURE II--THE PTOLEMAIC ERA (Continued.)
I said in my first Lecture, that even if royal influence be profitable
for the prosecution of physical science, it cannot be profitable for
art. It can only produce a literary age, as it did in the Ptolemaic
era; a generation of innumerable court-poets, artificial epigrammatists,
artificial idyllists, artificial dramatists and epicists; above all, a
generation of critics. Or rather shall we say, that the dynasty was not
the cause of a literary age, but only its correlative? That when the
old Greeks lost the power of being free, of being anything but the
slaves of oriental despots, as the Ptolemies in reality were, they lost
also the power of producing true works of art; because they had lost
that youthful vigour of mind from which both art and freedom sprang?
Let the case be as it will, Alexandrian literature need not detain us
long--though, alas! it has detained every boy who ever trembled over his
Greek grammar, for many a weary year; and, I cannot help suspecting, has
been the main cause that so many young men who have spent seven years in
learning Greek, know nothing about it at the end of the seven.
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